Posted 1 year ago on Nov. 10, 2017, 6:46 a.m. EST by factsrfun
(8329)
from Phoenix, AZ
This content is user submitted and not an official statement

By Joe Scarborough November 9 at 8:10 PM

It might be comforting to believe that Tuesday’s election can be explained as a political primal scream aimed at President Trump and his dangerous excesses. Some may even conclude that a Democratic sweep of next year’s midterms will follow along with the speedy impeachment of Trump. Then, surely, reason and order will return to the business of running the United States. Unfortunately, that pipe dream ignores the more profound meaning of this week’s election results: The shellacking Republicans took proves again just how unmoored American politics has become in the 21st century.

Democrats and Republicans have held a duopoly over Washington since Franklin Pierce got elected president in 1852. For most of that time, both parties saw their governing majorities rise and fall over the course of entire generations.

The Grand Old Party more or less dominated national politics from Abraham Lincoln’s election in 1860 until the Great Depression. Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Democratic coalition dominated from 1933 until the Reagan Revolution began to reshape politics in 1980. When Ronald Reagan’s Republican Party finally gained control of Congress 14 years later, it was the first time a GOP speaker had run the House in 40 years.

Since then, though, the political alignments that once endured decades of change have begun collapsing in two-year intervals. In 2004, Karl Rove spoke of a permanent Republican majority. Just over two years later, Nancy Pelosi became speaker of the House. In 2008, many hailed Barack Obama’s winning coalition as a new Democratic majority, built on a well-educated and demographically diverse coalition. Fast-forward two years and the tea party laid waste to all previous political presumptions. But their unfocused, anti-government zeal proved to be no match for Obama’s reelection campaign. At that time, Obama told Mika Brzezinski and me that his 2012 victory would finally make Republicans deal with his White House. But just two years later, Republicans again routed Democrats in local, state and national legislative races. And two years after that, Trump destroyed the Democratic establishment, but only after reducing the Republican political machine to rubble.

Now, less than a year after seizing control of all branches of government, Trumpism is in full retreat. Even before Tuesday’s drubbing, the president was weighed down by historically low approval ratings. The Republican Congress fares even worse, with a dismal 13 percent approval rating. Remarkably, the Democratic Party seemed even less united before Tuesday’s rout. The fact that Trump’s GOP was beaten so badly by the party of Donna Brazile and a Virginia gubernatorial candidate who one observer compared to a bag of mulch proves again that voters are voting against political parties instead of voting for inspiring leaders.

The last president to own majorities in both the House and Senate for two terms was Roosevelt. Since then, Republican majorities have been undone by the excesses of McCarthyism, Watergate and Iraq, while Democratic alliances have collapsed under the weight of Vietnam, a runaway welfare state, the enduring impact of the Great Recession and a brand of identity politics that some Democrats quietly suggest fed into Trump’s destructive rise.

It seems the long-term political turbulence shaking the United States’ two-party system to its knees comes from the inability of either party to explain why working-class jobs keep leaving the country and why most Americans’ wages have stagnated for decades. More importantly, no candidates have come forward with a convincing plan to turn those trends around.

Trump promised voters last year that his unique brand of economic witchcraft would magically send millions of workers back into coal mines, return automotive assembly lines to full capacity and transport U.S. workers back to a time when factories were spinning out manufactured goods and workers had a salary that supported their families. But the dreams Trump sold working-class Americans are already turning to dust. His promise of a more affordable and accessible health-care system is dead. His plan to reform the tax code now seems to be little more than a payoff to rich political patrons and billionaires like him. And instead of draining Washington’s swamp of unethical behavior, Trump has put his White House, his family and himself in the legal sights of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III.

Even if Tuesday’s election begins the long process of removing the president from office, Americans will be left with the same corrosive system that led voters to take a chance on Trump. The only way to escape that cycle is to break apart the hyper-partisan two-party duopoly that has kept Washington too divided, too dysfunctional and too directionless for too long.

12 Comments

So, "Duopoly" huh?!!! Interesting!! As is ... ''The only way to escape that cycle is to break apart the hyper-partisan two-party duopoly that has kept Washington too divided, too dysfunctional and too directionless for too long''! (From your link) Also see ...

If Scarborough who was previously a lawyer and a politician and served in the United States House of Representatives from 1995 to 2001 as a Repugnant Republican - from the 1st district of Florida and is also a visiting fellow at the Harvard Institute of Politics at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government can start to see the light re.the need to break U$A's Corp. Con-Troll-ed Duopoly; there's hope 4U yet!

oh a change is coming, but the ego whore Greens have NOTHING to do with it....if the Greens were growing then they would get more votes than way back in 2000 instead of a tiny fraction, if you ever stop being a political hack for the Greens you might even be a part of it.

U've got to try forgiving him. His facts R fkt & his head befuddled but deep down he knows Corp. Dems are really just like the NRA ... NO REAL ANSWERS! Where U at these days? Hope U are well and fyi...

The real answer is the two political parties depend on each other, it is a ladder of power and if we take out one of those legs, ie the GOP then the entire ladder of power will fall. People who vote for ego whore Greens help keep the GOP alive and keep the ladder of power standing.

Over time, All systems in the World self-organize towards critical states in which a small nudge can change drastically the subsequent trajectory in the phase space of the system. How much does it take to "end the World" when it is at a critical state of maximal tensions? A single trigger. It was demonstrated in the assassination of 1914. World War I, influenza pandemic, and World War II all originated from that. Multiple mighty empires perished.

To effect the changes that we the minutest minority here want, we must get the U.S. political system into a critical state first. That requires our not being absorbed by either major parties. A drop in a bucket doesn't amount to much of anything. However, a drop in a bucket finely balanced against an equal and opposite bucket on a balance can tip the scale decisively.

I believe that we can win the hearts of our people as they realize in frustration where they have been led to by the two major parties. We must work towards the finest balance between the two major parties. There must be anger against being dead-ended first before the anger can be channeled for the sorely needed change. We intend to win their hearts at that critical moment.

Allying ourselves with either major party will simply render us null-and-void for the change needed.

We've been here for years. You can see the effect of one-sided futility very well, can't you? Bernie Sanders was co-opted by fear, having essentially become a eunuch for effecting any needed change. Mx. Cheese won but she lost big. This is no longer the same old America politically. It's probably because she was living so high up the hog for so long in the Swamp that she couldn't see or feel the struggles of the everyday folks. She was just "last century." TeraERex was media savvy but he's in it to get the U.S. Presidency to bail out his repeated business failures. He must show fealty to Russia because who in the U.S. will loan him money after multiple bankruptcies? No one of legal means. However, Russia can use him alright, probably to squirrel money away from the godforesaken { I take this back: Siberian prison was great for scaring the Nazis; it has excellent no-defense defense against incoming nuclear bombs, just like our Southwest; nuclear environmental disaster sites can remain "pristinely undisturbed" by human encroachment and "naturally flushed"; its acting as a dustbin for exiled deposed dictators can serve a useful function alright } gangster state. Pootin is riding high on a great white shark from which he doesn't know how to dismount safely. He helped Yeltsin cover up but who will help him cover up? Russian oligarchs know this so they stash their money overseas to escape what they perceive as the inevitable collapse of Russia. Many of our people fall for the lies coming from the mouth of our Toad. Before our people will listen, things must get far more absurd than killing a few hundreds Russians in Syria ( avoiding conflict with Russia in Syria was what I thought our Toad would do better than Mx. Cheese but alas, our Toad is bumbling blindly with tweets flip-flopping faster than our state security and policy apparatus can track; before the U.S. troops killed the Russians, Turkey had threatened to attack the U.S. troops in Syria; meanwhile, our allies and Middle-Eastern states got commitment from our Secretary of State that the U.S. troops would stay indefinitely; yet our Toad tweeted that the U.S. would pull its troops out "soon" that lured the Russians to their deaths--utter irresponsibility towards the peoples there! We already got sixteen years of bad policy building up Iran--we don't need the fistula already in Iraq and Syria to punch through to Lebanon and ignite yet another war amongst all of the refugees there: Zionists, Palestinians, Syrians, Hezbollah, Lebanese, Hamas, and Gazans.) If we don't even speak their "language," how can our people even know the dire strait they have to cross as forced by the present political establishment?

People may well say that I was ridiculous in saying that Kim Il-Sung was the most important founder of modern Japan but there is logic there! That may even include the very cool modern South Korea ( its internet infrastructure and even subway displays in Seoul were far better { faster and widely available as well as relatively cheap } earlier than those of the U.S. suffering from Provincial Colossusitis--there is just so much vast expanse of "no-man's-paying-for-internet-link land" moonscape in the Southwest, excellent no-defense non-military WiFi-/cellphone-defacto-blackout defense against incoming nuclear bombs, though.)

I have always said real change is possible and the more people that stop pushing the ego whore Greens and start pushing change the better...it is the Greens and the Green Party political hacks that inhabit this forum that I have a problem with.